India ignores China, to attend Nobel event

After deep cogitation, India has decided to stand up to Chinese pressure and attend the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo on Friday. Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo is this year's recipient, and the Chinese government has been furious at anybody who wants to attend, warning them of "consequences",

Indian ambassador to Norway Banbit Roy will attend the ceremony on Friday, official sources said, as he has attended the peace prize ceremony over the past couple of years.

India has also delinked its attendance from the forthcoming visit of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao next week. This is significant, because it shows India is learning not to make all diplomatic activity into one long zero-sum story. The Chinese are liable to link it, however, as they have done with the Norwegians, breaking off trade talks with them.

India, though, stands at a different place. It was China that took potshots at Indian sovereignty and integrity by questioning the status of Jammu and Kashmir, by giving stapled visas to Indian citizens from that state. This has been India's biggest bugbear all of this year, but no amount of Indian warnings have had any effect on the Chinese. India even went to the extent of telling China that Kashmir was a "core" issue just as Tibet and Taiwan was to China, and silently promised its own "consequences".

On Wednesday, France joined the ranks of nations who will be present at the ceremony and Serbia dropped out, having been reminded by Beijing that it had supported Serbia on the Kosovo independence issue. Had India decided to absent itself on Friday, it would have been in august company -- three of US' major non-Nato allies (MNNA) have abandoned the shelter of the US to boycott the Nobel ceremony in deference to China. They are Pakistan, Philippines and Egypt.

On Wednesday too, Beijing announced its own version of a global peace prize -- the Confucius Peace Prize, whose first recipient is Lien Chan, former vice-president of Taiwan. Ostensibly set up by a group of Chinese professors, it's generally believed to be blessed by the Chinese Communist Party.